Thursday, May 9, 2013

The three women in Cleveland who were abducted and endured
years of isolation, rape, beatings, and more have incited widespread sympathy,
but how many people are aware of the NRA vendor who sells a shooting target that is "your ex-girlfriend"?
And how many people understand the larger issue of violence against women,
especially as religion impacts it? Upon reflection, anyone with a mind should
see the obvious connection between worship of a male-only God and worldwide
abuse of females.

What can we do?We
can be aware.

To that end, I post again the following, which I posted in
March of 2012:

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn has more practical suggestions
for transforming the world than any other book I know. It is painful to
read. The first chapters are so packed with excruciating information,
“the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the
world,” I could stand to read only small chunks at a time.

Its
detailed evidence of sexual violence against women and girls—honor
killings, bride beating, bride burning, genital cutting, forced
prostitution, rape as a tactic of war, acid to disfigure, and selling of
7- and 8-year-old girls into sexual slavery—tells us that gender
violence and discrimination is the paramount human rights problem of our
time. Indeed, it tells us that nothing would do more to ameliorate the
problems of the world than raising the status of women.

I say it’s painful, but you will read Half the Sky
easily, with absorbed attention, because these journalists, husband and
wife, know how to tell engrossing stories; it is not academic. One part
of you seeks relief from the brutality; another part of you can’t put
down the stories of individual women who defy their tormentors and with
dogged determination escape their circumstances and now are helping
others.

Some facts that document and illustrate the horror:

Biology
produces more males than females, but China has 107 males for
every 100 females (a greater disproportion among newborns), India
has 108 and Pakistan 111. What makes the females disappear? The
murder of women (femicide), the murder of female babies,
deliberately less care and feeding of girl babies.

A Nobel laureate economist estimates that the globe should have 107 million more women.

“One
third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. . . .
Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed
or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic
accidents, and war combined.”

“Far
more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the
early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into
slave plantations each year in the 18th or 19th centuries . . ."

Foreign Affairs
observed: ‘It seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade
is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th or 19th centuries was.’”

A story:

Meena
and the other girls were never allowed out of the brothel and were
never paid. They typically had 10 or more customers a day, 7 days a
week. If a girl fell asleep or complained about a stomachache, the issue
was resolved with a beating.

And
when a girl showed any hint of resistance, all the girls would be
summoned to watch as the recalcitrant one was tied up and savagely
beaten.

“They turned the stereo up loud to cover the screams,” Meena said dryly. . . .

“They held my children captive, so they thought I would never try to escape.”

From a victim (sincerely, not ironically):

. . . if the wife is truly disobedient, then of course her husband has to beat her.

From the chapter “Rule by Rape”:

Woineshet—a
battered, pint-sized girl surrounded by men who were threatening
her—told the court official that she had been abducted [and raped], and
she pleaded to be allowed to go home. The official, a man, didn’t want
to listen to a girl and told Woineshet to get it over with and marry
Aberew.

“Even if you go home, Aberew will go after you again,” the official told her. “So there’s no point in resisting.”

Half the Sky
also exposes the complexities of achieving change. Genital mutilation
has cultural approval in all of north Africa; women insist on it.
Sometimes aid groups have committed blunders that worsened conditions
for women and girls. Banning prostitution, for instance, does not work,
and legalizing-regulating may not work either.

Nothing
works better than education. So say women in the field and the world’s
chief economists in the UN and World Bank. They state that educating and
empowering women in the developing world is the most effective way to
reduce poverty and, for the highest possible return on investment,
to raise all economic indicators and bring benefits to whole societies.
Women are the linchpin of effective economies. But education does not
mean imposing Western values (learn how Tostan finally is making progress toward overcoming female genital cutting in Africa after Western methods failed).

I
invite readers to consider the pain of these women and also the hope of
real transformation, only possible if we allow women to become
confident and powerful. Half the Sky
lists effective organizations and gives specific suggestions. I don’t
see how you could read these chapters without being changed in some way.

In
churches, we need to change the talk about a lord or lords in the sky.
Women of the world have too many lords lording it over them—they don’t
need a god-lord besides. Yes, it’s hard to confront the aging,
ultra-conservative men ruling from Rome, but not harder than the
cultural changes we demand of the developing world.

Welcome

Interested in religions and spirituality? You've come to the right place.

In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is a two-edged challenge. It invites believers to rethink their dogmas, and it challenges people without faith to rethink their certainty that everything religious is bunk.